One point twenty one gigawatts?

I left the house at 11:00 this morning to buy my new computer. It's now 10:00 in the evening. The computer is running, and I have it all networked and the old drives from the dead computer accessable, but still I'm not done. It's going to have to wait for another day. Why don't I have it done, you may ask, since I just said I have everything working? Well, I figured I didn't want another disaster like this last one, so I bought a 1 terrabyte networking harddrive. Actually I bought two. The first one I got all hooked up and was in the middle of installing the software when it informed me that it would work with Windows XP or the 32 bit version of Vista, but not the 64 bit version of Vista. And guess which version I ended up with? Give yourself a $20 bill! I had a couple good leads on a good XP machine (thank you my California friend) but I ended up just going for the Vista. Anyway, I go back to Best Buy with the first server and trade it in for another one that is supposed to work with the 64 bit Vista. Yeah, it does. Sort of. Everything installed right, but you have to jump through about 1,236.97 hoops to get it to work, and somewhere I messed up. This took the bulk of the 11 hours. So, at 9:30 this evening I gave up, packed the thing up and plan on returning it. Now, I haven't given up on the terrabyte harddrive, I'm just going to get an external USB version and give up on the server aspect. I'll still be able to access it from all the computers on my little home network, but I won't have web based access. I was kind of looking forward to that, being able to get to my files from anywhere. But, alas, it's not worth the ulcer I'm working on.

So there it is, I'm back in business, on the net and blogging again. And so far, other than the server issue I gave up on, Vista hasn't been too bad to me. (knock, knock).

Oh, and by the way, the computer I use for my web site got a lot faster when I quadrupled the RAM with pieces of the dead computer. 256 MB bad, 1 Gig good!

Ohhh, I'm SCARED! Wal-Mart is making money!

Ok, you all know (or at least most of you do) that I'm not a big fan of forwarded propaganda emails. And this is no exception, other than the fact that it may be true. But so what? Wal-Mart makes money. Because Wal-Mart makes money, Wal-Mart grows. Same with McDonalds, Starbucks and Barnes & Noble. But for some reason when Wal-Mart does it's some sort of communist plot to overthrow the American way of life. Yeah, right. Wal-Mart is making tons of cash BECAUSE of the American way of life.

Now, don't get me wrong, I'm NOT a fan of Wal-Mart. Mainly because it's not worth wading through hoardes of unwashed Americans in sweat pants, down their narrow, dirty isles (eisles? eyeslieyes? I dunno) to stand in their 30 minute lines just so I can save a buck or two on a canned ham. But anyway, here's the gloom and doom-all I gotta do is hit 'forward' and send it on email that I got the other day. Didn't make me hate Wal-Mart any more or less, but did make me wonder if people actually think before they send these on their merry way to gum up my inbox.

For some reason when anyone talks about things like this I think
that the next villain for James Bond will be the CEO of WalMart...

--HOW BIG IS WAL-MART? This should boggle your mind (and scare you
too)!

• 1. At Wal-Mart, Americans spend $36,000,000 every hour of every
  day.
• 2. This works out to $20,928 profit every minute!
• 3. Wal-Mart will sell more from January 1 to St. Patrick's Day
  (March 17th) than Target sells all year.
• 4. Wal-Mart is bigger than Home Depot + Kroger + Target + Sears
  + Costco + K-Mart combined.
• 5. Wal-Mart employs 1.6 million people and is the largest
  private employer. And most can't speak English
• 6. Wal-Mart is the largest company in the history of the
  World.
• 7. Wal-Mart now sells more food than Kroger & Safeway
  combined, and keep in mind they did this in only 15 years.
• 8. During this same period, 31 Supermarket chains sought
  bankruptcy (including Winn-Dixie).
• 9. Wal-Mart now sells more food than any other store in the
  world.
• 10. Wal-Mart has approx 3,900 stores in the USA of which 1,906
  are S uperCenters; this is 1,000 more than it had 5 years ago.
• 11. This year, 7.2 billion different purchasing experiences will
  occur at a Wal-Mart store. (Earth's population is approximately 6.5
  billion.)
• 12. 90% of all Americans live within 15 miles of a
  Wal-Mart
• 13. Let Wal-Mart bail out Wall Street!
  

Update : still no computer

Well, I didn't have to take down the rest of the site, I tried hooking up the old harddrive in the web site computer, and it didn't work.  when I was going through it looking for the data for payroll, I discovered that something had happened to the operating system.  It wasn't there.  My "Windows" folder is empty.  Niiiice.  I also couldn't locate the data for payroll, so I had to do it all by hand.  That part was actually not to bad, but getting the printer to work on this computer was, well, let's just say - a lot of fun.  See, the CD drive on here is broken, which is why I've used it as the server instead of as a computer, so I couldn't install the printer driver from the enclosed CD.  Any why, oh why, does the automatic installation always ask you if you want it to search the internet for the driver, yet is NEVER able to find it?  Yeah, that's a useful little tool.  So I went to Panasonic's website to download the driver myself and found one of the most un-user friendly sites I've ever seen.  If it was a car it would be a 1972 AMC Gremlin.  It took me 45 minutes and several ulcers to actually find the driver and get it downloaded.  But it finally came through, payroll is done and I've got a week and a half to get a new computer and a payroll program for it.  So right now I'm working on a computer with no CD drive, low memory, old processor that is postitioned in a way that it is awkward to work on.  Ok, I'm done complaining.

Things could be worse.  On the way up to class today we stopped off at Chili's for dinner and saw a couple cop cars, fire engine and ambulance at the Staples right next door.  At least I'm not the owner of the Buick that was parked in the front door of that store.  Completely inside, the back bumper was right where the door used to be.  And fortunately the Trax train up by the U that got derailed and was kinda sideways on the track was all cleaned up by the time we got done with dinner.  Of course the friend I ride to class with had the heels on her boots go all skewampus and had to throw them away and walk to Trax in her socks.  We just barely missed the Sandy train at the Galivan center, and I gave her one of my shoes to stand on, so there we were each perched on one foot, leaning up against one another.  A guy, who let's say had a little bit to drink, started talking to us and after a bit mistook our holding each other up for something more carnal, apologized (in a somewhat crude way) for interrupting and walked away.  But, again, at least it wasn't my Buick parked inside the Staples.

And I did get a good laugh today.  The teacher next to me had a substitute and she had to kick a couple of freshmen into my classroom.  I have a small class with all seniors and juniors in it, so it wasn't a problem.  The 9th graders this year are a pretty rowdy group overall, and I guess that the reputation of these freshmen were well known; at one point one of the juniors said "I hope puberty hits these 9th graders before I have to."  Yeah, somedays I like teaching high school.

Technical Difficulties.

Tried buying a PC that still runs on Windows XP lately? Not so easy. Vista has taken over, which would be all fine and dandy, except a lot of XP programs will not work on Vista. So I tried to get a new computer at Best Buy with XP. They had only one, and lo and behold, they were sold out of them. I'm going to have to order it special order and who knows when it will get here. The bad news is that I have stuff to do on my old computer, so I'm going to have to gut the computer I'm using and try to get the other hard drive to work here. And that means that http://www.srossi.net/ is going to be down for a while.

The good news is that since http://www.srossi.net/ is a blend of my own website and a blog, you will still be able to get to the important stuff. You will still be able to access:

• all my posts since April of 2007
• all my important links, including
• the link to srossi e-mail.

so, if you generally access my site from http://www.srossi.net/, you will need to bookmark this link instead:

http://ladunata.blogspot.com/

you will still be able to access your srossi.net email through here.

http://www.srossi.net/ will be going offline sometime in the evening on Tuesday, December 2, 2008.

see ya around and I'll keep you updated.

Down to the wire at the "U", payroll due, lesson plans needed and...

KABOOM!

...my computer at home froze up, fried and in at least 3.14159 other distinct ways died. Which means that my assignment didn't get turned in and the employees at Free Wheeler are going to have to wait a couple days to get paid (the owner is going to front them any money they absolutely need before I can get the checks done, so nobody's going to starve or get evicted).

It also means that, since I can only blog when I'm in class at the U (blogs blocked at work) that although I'll be able to post your comments, I probably won't take the time right now to respond to them. Sorry. I do plan to go out and get a new computer tomorrow, but I'll still have to set it up and get caught up on payroll and classwork before I get to catch up on blogging.